Andy Warhol
Nude Model (Male)

1977
Polacolor Type 108 on paper
2.75 x 3.5 in.
2008.242
Gift of © The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc.

Andy Warhol’s openly queer identity brings up the significance of the Gay Male Gaze in conjunction with the Heterosexual Male Gaze in Nude Model (Male). In an objectifying gesture, Warhol, with his camera, casts his Gaze down upon the rear of his subject, cropping out everything else. The subject in this photograph is reduced to little more than a fetishized object. This objectification of the male body by a male disrupts the systems of the Heterosexual Male Gaze (the normative Male Gaze), in which the male figure possesses agency and the female figure’s meaning is limited to that of object.

This still leaves us with the binaries of male/female and gay/straight, which Warhol begins to erode through this same Gaze. His Gaze includes very few signifiers of the subject’s gender. Other than the title, the subject’s body hair is the only suggestion of their gender, but this signifier isn’t strong enough to carry the significance on its own, for if the title were to state otherwise one would be compelled to trust that over the sign. Through exposing this performative and constructed nature of gender, Warhol’s model finds power and agency all of their own, beyond the control of a hetero/cis-normative society.

Gunnar Olseth ‘19
Lasting Legacy 2019